Vermont-born leader Calvin Coolidge may have been a man of few words but a new biography argues that his presidential legacy speaks for itself.

Feb. 24, 2013

Cover of 'COOLIDGE,' the new biography by Amity Shlaes. / Courtesy photo

Written by

Douglas Gladstone

Free Press Correspondent

This is an undated handout photo of President Calvin Coolidge, left, talking with his father, John Coolidge, who swore him in as president at their home in Plymouth, Vt. / AP Photo/Vermont Historical Society

Book details:

WHAT: President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site WHERE: Vermont 100A, Plymouth WHEN: Open May 25 through Oct. 20 ADMISSION: $2-$7.50 (free for children under 6). 672-3773, www.historicsites.vermont.gov/coolidge

Calvin Coolidge working the hay in Plymouth, Vt. This year marks the 90th anniversary of Calvin Coolidge taking the presidential oath of office. The new biography 'COOLIDGE' offers insight into how Coolidge's upbringing in rural Vermont influenced him as a president. / PHOTO COURTESY OF THE FORBES LIBRARY 1924

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Three-quarters of the way through her new biography of Calvin Coolidge, author Amity Shlaes recounts a conversation the president had with the head of his Secret Service detail, Colonel Edmund William Starling, while walking through Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C. Advised by the agent that he had found a young boy pressing his face to the White House gates, in an effort to see the president and offer him condolences on the death of one of his two sons, 16-year-old Calvin, Jr., Coolidge had difficulty containing his emotions.

"Colonel," Coolidge told Starling, "whenever a boy wants to see me, always bring him in. Never turn one away or make him wait."

It is by far the best personal anecdote about the 30th President of the United States in a work full of many such reveals. Long dismissed as buttoned-up, old-fashioned and passive, Coolidge comes off in a whole different light thanks to Shlaes, who provides new insight into a man whose quiet composure, she maintains, didn't represent weakness, but rather strength.

In the book, titled appropriately enough, “COOLIDGE,” Shlaes produces a painstakingly researched tome portraying Vermont’s own Coolidge as a model of what all elected officials can accomplish if they are truly committed to the concept of public service.

Coolidge was exposed to life as a legislator very early, since his own father, John C. Coolidge, had been elected to the Senate in the Vermont State Legislature in 1872. In his autobiography, which was serialized in Cosmopolitan Magazine in 1929, the former president writes about how his grandfather took him to visit the Statehouse in Montpelier.

“I think I was three years and four months old, but I always remembered the experience," writes Coolidge. "Grandfather carried me to the State House and sat me in the Governor’s chair, which did not impress me so much as a stuffed catamount that was in the Capital Museum."

According to Coolidge scholar Jerry L. Wallace, of Oxford, Kansas, Coolidge grew up participating in and observing the workings of local government because, besides running a store in the middle of town, his father also worked in law enforcement and, perhaps most famously, was later a notary. This year marks the 90th anniversary of Calvin Coolidge taking the presidential oath of office, which was administered by his father by the light of a kerosene lamp on August 3, 1923 at 2:47 a.m.

A penchant for pinching pennies

After serving as a successful storekeeper, John Coolidge became a farmer. In his autobiography, Coolidge remembers his father operating a self-sufficient farm in which "nothing was wasted that could be used." It was this type of frugality that contributed to Coolidge's later actions as chief executive.

Coolidge cut taxes four times in six years and produced a budget surplus each year of his presidency. Accordingly, Shlaes argues that, at this time of high unemployment and skyrocketing debt, maybe we could all learn a thing or two from Coolidge — the only president to be born on Independence Day.

The period in which he held office may have been known as the Roaring Twenties for good reason — Coolidge, as Shlaes points out, pared a $28 billion national debt that he inherited when Warren Harding died down to $17.65 billion by the time he left office. In July 1921, there had been 5.7 million Americans out of work; when he left office, that figure was 1.8 million. Under Coolidge, the top income tax rate came down by half, to 25 percent. Under Coolidge, the rich came to pay a greater share of the income tax.

Coolidge was consumed by curtailing spending and righting the economy, Shlaes suggests, because of the cloud that hung over his family — Coolidge's great grandfather, Oliver, had been thrown in prison in 1849 over his failure to pay a neighbor a debt of $24.23.

Pop psychology aside, Coolidge's well documented thriftiness was influenced by his childhood. He and his family were always doing something to earn a living, whether it be selling wooden logs by the cord, shearing sheep or raising horses. His father — who founded the famous Plymouth Cheese Factory in 1890 — turned to harvesting maple sugar because he was challenged by the fact that the limekiln lot they owned on their property, in Plymouth, Vermont, was rocky and there was no railroad to transport the lime to the big cities even if he had been able to cultivate any.

Similarly, when it came time for the Coolidges to milk cows, the milk they tried to sell spoiled because there was no railroad. To sell a calf, they had to take it 12 miles by cart to Ludlow, Vermont, where a train depot was.

Family motto: Always pay in cash

Small wonder, then, that Coolidge's actions as president were heavily influenced by his boyhood. For example, his sympathy for tariffs on Canadian maple sugar grew out of these experiences; he supported taxing the Canadian imports because the small harvest of maple sugar from his own lot had competed with Canada's product.

Jennifer Harville, Coolidge’s great granddaughter, acknowledges that the apple didn't fall very far from the tree. "My grandfather was a thrifty man," said Harville, who resides in Westmoreland, N.H. "He got that from his own father, the president."

Harville recalls family dinners in which her grandfather, who was 93 when he passed in 2000, "always paid in cash when we went out to eat. There could have been nine or 10 of us in the dinner party, but he never used a credit card. I had never seen $100 bills before that, I was so in awe that he always had the money on him to pay for things."

According to Shlaes, Coolidge clearly believed that the national household resembled the family household, and that we should all learn to subsist on modest budgets. "What's clear is that Coolidge was not atypical in equating household at home with national household," Shlaes explained in an interview with the Free Press. "The root of the word 'economy' is Greek, for household or household management."

Some of the most humorous parts of the book, in fact, detail Coolidge's running battles with the White House housekeeper, Elizabeth Jaffray, over the costs incurred at official state dinners. That's because he monitored the White House housekeeper with the same vigilance he monitored the departments of the federal government. For example, the dinner wines that were normally purchased for such functions stopped as soon as Coolidge took office. Of Coolidge, Mrs. Jaffray noted in her journal that he "liked at least the privilege of discussing the menus."

The Vermont way: Standing up for self reliance

Coolidge's parsimoniousness was actually a disciplined form of self-restraint, contends Shlaes. According to her, thrift, independence and a good character were all essential to a Vermonter's personal makeup. "The Vermonters say it themselves, so we have to take them at their word," she told the Free Press.

Perhaps nowhere was this restraint better demonstrated than in Coolidge's consistent refusal to help Vermont recover from the massive floods that decimated parts of New England in November 1927. The damage in the state capital, Montpelier, amounted to $2 million alone — the equivalent of one-eighth of the annual state budget.

Other than help the Red Cross trumpet a fundraising campaign, Coolidge didn't do anything to bail out his home state. Not that the native son didn't want to. First, explains Shlaes, he hadn't done anything to help southern states when floods ravaged the Missssippi Valley six months earlier, in April 1927. But more importantly, Coolidge earnestly felt that states, rather than the federal government, should pay their own share when it came to such matters.

"Behind Coolidge's reluctance to dish out flood money was his concern that giving money to Vermont would undermine his credibility in refusing the pleas to the federal government to spend great amounts on disaster relief or dam building elsewhere," Shlaes said. But she also adds that Vermont's way was to allow people to help themselves and to "demonstrate their independence."

If ever there was a test of living by example, writes Shlaes, the Vermont floods were Coolidge's. The people of his home state even seemed to understand and acknowledge the president's dilemma. "He can't do for his own, you see, more than he did for the others," said one Vermonter to reporter Louis Lyons, in a November 13, 1927 Boston Globe story.

"If U.S. leaders emulated Calvin Coolidge today, in some areas today we'd be better off," Shlaes said. "We overlook Calvin Coolidge because we tend to dismiss the 1920s as an economic mirage, like champagne bubbles in Gatsby's glass. But the growth in the period was real, unemployment was low, pay was good, and people got new products and services, like Ford autos or electricity."

'Vermont is a state I love'

Six months before leaving office, Coolidge took a two-day farewell tour of Vermont by train. All told, he and the First Lady, Grace Coolidge, visited 12 cities, including Burlington, which is where his wife came from. But it was when he reached Bennington, on September 21, 1928, that he was overcome with the same kind of profound emotion that overtook him when his Secret Service agent, Colonel Starling, told him about the boy who wanted to offer him condolences upon learning of the death of his son.

In what has since been called his "Brave Little State of Vermont," speech, Coolidge's famous taciturn demeanor gave way to justifiable pride for his home state.

"Vermont is a state I love," he said. "I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all I love her because of her indomitable people.

"They are a race of pioneers who almost impoverished themselves for a love of others," he continued. "If ever the spirit of liberty should vanish from the rest of the union, it could be restored by the generous store held by the people in this brave little state of Vermont."

It was a reminder, concludes Shlaes, that all Americans have a little Vermont in them.

Shlaes is a syndicated columnist for Bloomberg and director of the George W. Bush Institute's 4% Growth Project, as well as a trustee of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation. Her book was released by Harper Collins on Feb. 12.